Spike Jonze: Hollywood’s Lonely Boy

Spike Jonze hopes the high-tech love story of Her will make you cry

Spike Jonze is earnest, calm, thoughtful, artistic, lonely, private and a bunch of other things that I don’t want from a trickster. From the skate-punk photographer who pretended he was the leader of a group of awful local breakdancers, who co-produces the Jackass movies, who is the creative director of the gonzo-bro news brand Vice, who made the greatest music videos of all time, who was a brilliant actor in Three Kings before deciding he was too cool for acting, who directed the weirdness that is Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, who fought bitterly with his studio to turn Where the Wild Things Are into a kid’s movie so true to what it feels like to be a kid that kids didn’t see it and who shares a name with the novelty-song big-band leader of the 1940s–I want a little bit of edge. …